The expatriate edition of the Telegraph offers a fine collection of anecdotes of politically correct stupidity during 2005 in Britain and abroad:

• A market trader in Derby was banned from selling candles – unless they carried a notice warning that they can burn.

• A constable who saved the life of a man who was high on drugs by stopping him jumping from a window was reprimanded. PC Amerjit Singh, who had been summoned to a house in Cambridgeshire to prevent the potential suicide, had used “undue force” in holding the man back from killing himself. The man’s father complained.

• Labour’s election slogan – Forwards Not Backwards – sounded ironic to most Germans. The words were the East German government’s standard election cliché and slogan, just before the Berlin wall came down and Communism collapsed in 1989. Germans still use the term as a bad joke…

And so on.